I should know to expect regional holidays–I do, after all, teach routinely teach my students about Dyngus Day, Pinkster, and the importance of county fairs. But, somehow, I never really thought about the impact of Derby Day on my SLAC.
So far, two students have wished me a Happy Oaks Day and I’ve seen a lot of women wearing hats. Rumor has it that attendance can be spotty but I haven’t experienced that phenomenon.
I also had to cancel some Saturday dinner plans because the restaurant won’t be open.
When student number 2 bestowed the glad tidings of the day upon me, I was practically daydream walking. I have been trying to concisely articulate my newest project and have not been very successful. My dissertation examined rituals in revolutionary America and connected those rituals to ideas of citizenship and religious obligation. It is a topic I’m still passionate about and will continue to work on for the foreseeable future.
Given my current location, however, and my desire to have a project that would more easily lend itself to student projects and digital experiments, I wanted to expand into a new research topic. Luckily, I long ago made a word document where I collected ideas and scraps of information that didn’t belong in my dissertation.
One of those scraps was that the Emlen School for the Benefit of Children of African and Indian Descent was originally located in Mercer County, Ohio–not far from where I grew up.
Another scrap was a statement in a history of the Wyandot mission at Upper Sandusky about the presence of free blacks in the native community.
Together, these scraps made me think about the rural free black communities in antebellum Ohio and the relationship they had with native communities and religious missions. Over the past year I have collected census data and combed through digital databases (including Google books) to create a nice base of information on several of these free black communities. Over the summer I plan to visit a number of archives in Ohio and I’m scheduled to present at two conferences next year.
As excited as I am about this project, I’m also nervous. While I see connections between my projects, this is a very new research area for me which involves a new historiography. As much as I can bemoan the sheer amount of scholarship on the revolution–it is the devil I know.
This project though makes a lot of practical sense as I can easily get to the archives which are largely underutilized. There are a number of projects that I can have my students work on including, I hope, a map of religious denominations on the frontier in the early republic.
So, here I am on my first Oaks Day thinking about other new beginnings.
SLACing 